Politique

The president of Niger has said American and other foreign troops working in his country should limit themselves to providing training, equipment and intelligence, not fighting jihadists, in the wake of the botched raid in which five Nigerien and four US soldiers died last year.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian, Mahamadou Issoufou also promised to quit as president when his second term comes to an end in 2021, committing not to abolish term limits and hang on to power.

Europe is not doing enough to support Niger in addressing the root causes of migration, Issoufou added. The west African country has long been a transit point for people from other parts of the continent seeking refuge or a better life in Europe, but in recent years the government has cracked down hard on the lucrative business of moving, feeding and sheltering them.

Niger is doing its part to keep the number of people crossing the Mediterranean low; Europe must do more to help fight poverty and create jobs, the president said.

The foreign armies operating in Niger should limit themselves to supporting the country’s own forces, he said, and not go into combat. Last October, a joint patrol was ambushed near the village of Tongo Tongo by jihadists they had been hunting, leading to a national scandal when the US president, Donald Trump, allegedly told one of the soldiers’ widows that her late husband “knew what he signed up for”.

“We’re not asking foreign forces to fight in our place,” Issoufou said, sitting with his advisers in the airy presidential palace in the capital, Niamey. “We’re battling to ensure the security of our country. What we ask of our allies is to help us reinforce the operational capacity of our security forces through training, equipment and intelligence.”

Asked whether his government had known US troops were fighting on the ground, he said: “That unfortunate operation with the American soldiers – of course we knew about it, because our soldiers were together. It was an intelligence-gathering operation that unfortunately had the consequences it did.”

The US originally claimed it had been a reconnaissance mission, too, before US Africa Command admitted last month that the team had misrepresented what had actually been a capture-or-kill mission.

As well as being president of the world’s 11th poorest country and one that is facing threats on almost all sides – from Islamic State in the Greater Sahara in the west, Boko Haram in the east, to a chaotic, divided Libya to the north – Issoufou is president of the G5 Sahel, a joint effort by five west African countries to try to bring the vast, arid Sahel under control.

“The security situation in the Sahel is still very difficult. We are facing very grave threats, firstly from terrorist organisations, but not just them,” Issoufou said. “There are also organisations trafficking drugs, people and arms. So the G5 Sahel has to fight organised crime as well as terrorism. One country can’t face all that alone.”

Troops have been assembled from Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad, but though the European Union, Saudi Arabia, the US and others promised €414m in funding in February, now, halfway through the year, hardly any of the money has reached the G5 Sahel bank account.

In any case, according to Issoufou, those pledges only cover one year of operations, so the G5 Sahel has asked the UN security council to help it get longer-term funding.

“As you can imagine, the fight against this threat will last longer than one year,” he said. “That’s what’s happened in Iraq and Syria in the fight against Isis – the most powerful armies in the world spent more than three years there.”

He added: “The G5 Sahel’s objective is not just to fight terrorism – it’s also working on development. Why does terrorism arise in certain areas of the Sahel? Because of poverty. Security and development go together.”

The same factors were key to stopping migration, he said, calling on the EU to step up its support of Niger after the latter criminalised the smuggling of migrants, an industry on which thousands of Nigeriens depended.

“Europe is making an effort, but it’s not enough. We need more resources for development … it’s about attacking poverty,” Issoufou said.

“We need to educate young Nigeriens, to train them, to look after them, to feed them. If we want to keep our young people – and it’s rural people who usually go and look for work in Europe, they’re the source of this migration – we have to try harder with developing agriculture, as that’s what creates a lot of jobs.

“Niger is doing all this, but what we often lack are the resources to do it, and it’s important that Europe does more. The EU is our number one donor, and our our cooperation with them is well known, but we ask more from them.”

Issoufou’s government arrested and imprisoned 26 civil society activists over a protest that went ahead in March despite being banned. Many of them have been transferred from their hometowns to prisons around the country, including in the insecure region of Tillabéri.

Asked about this crackdown, Issoufou said that it was important to have a “democratic, but strong” state.

“There are two things you have to avoid. Firstly, anarchy in a country, secondly, dictatorship. In a country, democracy is what? Order, and liberty. Order without freedom is dictatorship. Freedom without order is anarchy.

“There’s no dictatorship in Niger. I hear people saying: ‘Oh là là, there’s a dictatorial regime in Niger.’ No. Dictatorship is not like that.”